Библиография. — 256

Summary. — 263

The catalogue of the temporary exhibition, Roads of Arabia. Archaeological Treasures of Saudi Arabia, as well as the exhibition itself, organized jointly by The State Hermitage Museum and The Saudi Commission for Tourism and Antiquities, are to familiarize the reader and the spectator with the cultural heritage of the many civilizations in the Arabian Peninsula from the Paleolithic Period up to the founding of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia at the beginning of the twentieth century. The exhibits belong to different museums of Saudi Arabia. A considerable number of these have been discovered and published during the several past decades by archaeologists and historians both from Saudi Arabia and other countries. Therefore, the exhibition is an excellent example of international scholarly cooperation.

The main topic of the exhibition is roads, both trade and pilgrimage routes, connecting Arabia with the rest of the world, on the one hand, and connecting different parts of the country, on the other. The major portion of the exhibits date from the pre-Islamic Period. The five sections of the exhibition and the catalogue are devoted to Pre-historic Arabia (Section 1), the cultural contacts of North-Eastern Arabia and the adjacent territories in the 6th — 2nd millennia В.С. (Section 2), the states that arose and flourished in the oases of Hijaz, North-Western Arabia, in the second half of the 1st millennium В.С. (Section 3), the trade cities of Central Arabia in the late 1st millennium В.С. — early 1st millennium A.D. (Section 4) and, again, North-Eastern Arabia revived in the Hellenistic Period following a long period of decline (Section 5). In general, the exhibits reflect the active contacts which the ancient Arabian states developed, during several millennia, with Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus Valley, the countries of the Mediterranean and, later on, with the world of Classical Antiquity.

Section 6 includes finds of the Islamic Period, e.g. those from pilgrimage routes leading from various parts of the Moslem World to the Holy Cities of Islam, Mecca and Medina; funerary steles from the renowned al-Ma‘la cemetery in Mecca; and monuments of the Osman Period, including the seventeenth-century Door of the Ka‘ba, probably by Turkish masters.

The catalogue is based on that of the 2010 exhibition at the Louvre: Roads of Arabia. Archaeology and History of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Ed. by Ali I. Al-Ghabban, B. Andre-Salvini et al. Paris, 2010 (see, Louvre 2010).